Vienna and Sofia
Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna on October 29, 1923, to two Jewish physicians. His father, Samuel Djerassi, was a Bulgarian dermatologist and specialist in sexually transmitted diseases from Sofia; his mother, Alice Friedmann, was a Viennese dentist and physician. He spent his earliest years in Sofia, and after his parents divorced he lived with his mother in Vienna, returning to Bulgaria for summers with his father. Until the age of fourteen he attended the same Viennese grammar school that Sigmund Freud had attended decades earlier.
It was a cosmopolitan, educated, secular upbringing, with one foot in each of two very different capitals. It came to an abrupt end in March 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
Escape
Austria had refused the boy citizenship, and after the Anschluss Jews in Vienna faced immediate persecution. To get his son and former wife out, Samuel Djerassi briefly remarried Alice, giving them the protection of Bulgarian status, and the two left for Sofia, where Carl lived with his father for a year. Bulgaria, though not free of antisemitism, would later save its entire Jewish population of some 48,000 from deportation to the Nazi death camps. In Sofia Carl attended the American College, where he became fluent in English.
In December 1939 he and his mother reached the United States, almost penniless. She found work in a medical practice in upstate New York; he was sixteen and determined to get an education. His father followed in 1949, practised medicine in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and eventually retired near his son in San Francisco.
A letter to Eleanor Roosevelt
Because of a misunderstanding over his Bulgarian school’s name, Djerassi was enrolled at Newark Junior College before he had finished high school. After a year, with no money for a four-year college, he wrote directly to the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for help. The reply came from the Institute of International Education, offering a full scholarship to Tarkio College in Missouri. He stayed only briefly before moving to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he graduated in chemistry summa cum laude.
In 1942–43 he worked as a chemist for CIBA in New Jersey, where he helped develop tripelennamine (Pyribenzamine), one of the first commercial antihistamines and his first patent. He then earned a PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1945, with a thesis on converting the male hormone testosterone into the female hormone estradiol. The chemistry of sex hormones would define his career.
Mexico City and the steroid race
In 1949 Djerassi became associate director of research at Syntex, a small pharmaceutical company in Mexico City founded in 1944 by the chemist Russell Marker and colleagues to make steroid hormones from diosgenin, a compound found in a wild Mexican yam. He was recruited by the company’s research director, George Rosenkranz, and later said that one attraction was that Syntex owned an expensive modern spectrophotometer.
Their first great race was for cortisone, the new wonder drug against arthritis. In 1951 Djerassi’s group completed a synthesis of cortisone from diosgenin that used a cheaper raw material and about half as many steps as competing methods, although in the end Upjohn’s microbial process proved the most commercially successful.
The pill molecule
The same year brought a discovery of far greater consequence. Natural progesterone, the hormone that prevents ovulation during pregnancy, is largely destroyed in the body when swallowed. Djerassi’s team set out to make a version that would work by mouth. On 15 October 1951, Luis Miramontes, a young Mexican chemistry student working under Djerassi’s supervision and Rosenkranz’s direction, completed the synthesis of 19-nor-17α-ethynyltestosterone, known as norethindrone or norethisterone. It proved one of the most potent oral progestins ever made, far stronger than natural progesterone. Syntex filed a patent application in November 1951.
Others turned the molecule into medicine. Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang tested such compounds as contraceptives in animals, and the gynaecologist John Rock tested them in women. The US Food and Drug Administration approved norethindrone in 1957 for menstrual disorders. The first pill approved for contraception, in 1960, was G. D. Searle’s Enovid, based on the closely related norethynodrel; norethindrone was approved as a contraceptive in 1962 and marketed as Ortho-Novum. Djerassi became known as the father of the pill, a title he acknowledged was shared with many others but which stuck to him for the rest of his life.
Professor and entrepreneur
Djerassi never chose between academia and industry. He taught at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1952 to 1959 while keeping his ties to Syntex, returned to Mexico as its vice-president of research, and in 1960 became professor of chemistry at Stanford University, where he remained until 2002. From 1968 to 1972 he was also president of Syntex Research in Palo Alto. He published more than 1,200 scientific papers, pioneered the use of mass spectrometry and optical rotatory dispersion to determine the structures of steroids and alkaloids, and in 1965, with the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg and the computer scientist Edward Feigenbaum, devised DENDRAL, a pioneering artificial-intelligence program for identifying molecular structures and a prototype for the expert systems that followed.
In 1968 he founded Zoecon, which developed environmentally gentler insect control based on insect hormones that stop larvae from maturing. He received the National Medal of Science in 1973 for his work on oral contraceptives, an honour made ironic by the discovery that his name was on President Nixon’s enemies list. He was the first recipient of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1978, received the National Medal of Technology in 1991 for his pest-control work, and won the American Chemical Society’s Priestley Medal in 1992. In 2010 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and a glacier in Antarctica bears his name.
A second life in literature
In 1985 Djerassi said that he wanted to lead one more life and to leave a cultural imprint on society rather than just a technological benefit. He became a prolific writer of what he called science-in-fiction, novels portraying the real behaviour of scientists, their rivalries and ambitions. Cantor’s Dilemma (1989), about suspected scientific fraud, was followed by The Bourbaki Gambit, Menachem’s Seed, NO and Marx, Deceased.
He then turned to the stage. An Immaculate Misconception (1998) dealt with the fertility technique ICSI; Oxygen (1999), written with the Nobel chemist Roald Hoffmann, dramatised a quarrel over who discovered oxygen; Calculus explored the Newton–Leibniz dispute. Four Jews on Parnassus, published in 2008, imagined a conversation among four German-speaking Jewish intellectuals, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem and Arnold Schönberg, about identity, fame and legacy, organised around Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus. His plays were translated and performed widely in Europe and beyond. Later plays included Taboos (2006), on reproduction, gender and politics, and Insufficiency (2012), a bitter satire of academic life. He also wrote poetry, which he said he had begun writing out of self-pity and revenge, and four volumes of autobiography, the last of which, In Retrospect, appeared in 2014. When the London Sunday Times Magazine published its list of the thirty most important people of the millennium in 1999, his was the one living name on it; he wrote that his inclusion was patently ridiculous by any criterion but one, as a surrogate for the Pill.
Loss, art and identity
Djerassi married three times and had two children with his second wife, the writer Norma Lundholm. In 1978 their daughter Pamela, an artist, took her own life. With the help of his companion and later third wife, the Stanford biographer Diane Middlebrook, he turned grief into something constructive: he closed his cattle ranch in the hills of San Mateo County, whose name SMIP originally stood for Syntex Made It Possible, and converted it into the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, a retreat for working artists. A major collector of Paul Klee, he arranged for his collection to go to the Albertina in Vienna and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
He described himself as a Jewish atheist. His relationship with Austria, the country that had refused him citizenship and expelled his family, was gradually repaired: in his later years he received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art (1999) and other high Austrian honours, as well as Germany’s Grand Cross of the Order of Merit (2003); a postage stamp bearing his portrait marked his eightieth birthday, and the Austrian government sent him a new passport.
Last years and legacy
Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007. Djerassi kept writing and lecturing into his late eighties, dividing his time between San Francisco and Europe. He died on January 30, 2015, aged ninety-one, of complications of liver and bone cancer.
The oral contraceptive that his laboratory helped make possible changed the lives of hundreds of millions of women, allowing them to plan when and whether to have children, and transforming education, work and family across much of the world. Djerassi’s life was a twentieth-century parable: a teenage Jewish refugee, saved by a timely remarriage and a Bulgarian refuge, who reached America with almost nothing, helped create one of the century’s most socially consequential inventions, and then reinvented himself again as a writer determined to show the public what scientists are really like.
Sources & further reading
Carl Djerassi, Wikipedia · Carl Djerassi, Science History Institute · Luis E. Miramontes, Wikipedia · Enovid: The First Hormonal Birth Control Pill, Embryo Project, Arizona State University · Carl Djerassi, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.